Sestroretsk Tool Plant

(full name S. P. Voskov Sestroretsk Tool Plant), one of the oldest enterprises in the USSR, located in Sestroretsk Raion, Leningrad. The plant specializes in the production of cutting tools, such as drills, milling tools, taps, and threading dies, and specialized cutters for machine tools with numerical programmed control and for automatic transfer machines. It also produces machine tools for the machine-building and instrument-making industries, as well as household tools.

The plant was founded in 1721 as an arms factory. Outstanding gunsmiths who worked there included S. I. Mosin— designer of the 30-caliber magazine rifle and head of the plant from 1894 to 1902—and V. A. Degtiarev, F. V. Tokarev, and V. G. Fedorov—the creators of automatic weapons. The first revolutionary circles at the plant were organized in 1897, and a Bolshevik party organization was established in 1905. Between 1905 and 1907 the Sestroretsk workers supplied the workers of Petrograd with weapons. In February 1917, a revolutionary commissariat was formed to direct the plant, and detachments of the Red Guard were created under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, with S. P. Voskov and F. P. Griadinskii as chairmen of the plant committee. In July-August 1917, N. A. Emel’ianov, a plant worker acting on orders from the party Central Committee, hid V. I. Lenin from the persecution of the bourgeois Provisional Government. Emel’ianov hid Lenin in the settlement of Razliv and in a hut across Lake Razliv. The plant party organization supplied Lenin with an identity card in the name of K. P. Ivanov, worker at the plant. In October 1917 the Sestroretsk Red Guards participated in the defense of Smol’nyi and the storming of the Winter Palace.

In November 1922 the plant shifted to peacetime production, manufacturing metal-cutting and fitting and assembling tools and measuring instruments. In the same year, the plant was named in honor of S. P. Voskov. Under the prewar five-year plans of 1929–40, the range of tools produced increased by a factor of four, and the volume of production increased by a factor of 11.3. At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45, the plant was evacuated to Novosibirsk and Leningrad. The Leningrad section of the plant shifted to the production of automatic weapons for the front, and the Novosibirsk section produced tools and machine tools with the Sestroretsk brand.

The plant was restored in Sestroretsk between 1946 and 1948. During the postwar years, the range of cutting tools produced was significantly expanded and the volume of production increased. New forms of high-efficiency tools made of various grades of steel and hard alloys were produced. The plant exports to many countries, and the level of mechanization and automation of production is high. The Sestroretsk Tool Plant was awarded the Order of the October Revolution in 1971.